The way this article talks about murder rates is super unhelpful. What is the rate of unsolved murders per capita? That’s what’s really needed to say that the rate is increasing. They talk about a lot of potential reasons that murders go unsolved these days, but they missed the one that’s easiest to check: what if the types of murders that are easier to solve are dropping faster than those that are harder to solve as crime rates have been dropping in the US for decades?

Maryland

I live in a suburb of Washington DC. Like most small US cities, mine was built around a stroad. My city’s elected officials care a great deal about biking infrastructure, but since the stroad cutting our town in half, along which is one of the only places where mixed use development is allowed by the state and county, is a state road, the city can do little but beg for them to fix it.

The state has finally decided to add bike gutters along the road, but with the car traffic speed and density that we have, I doubt that will have a great impact by itself. If I could change one thing, it would be to give that state road a diet and add protected bike lanes.

I have everything set up with ZigBee, homekit, a few wifi devices, and home assistant, and it works great! Home assistant acts as a homekit hub, so I don’t need any apple devices and it all stays local. Kasa smart switches from TP-Link can be set up for local control with a CLI, so you don’t even need an app. ZigBee is all local anyway.

The only device I have that calls home is a Frigidaire dehumidifier. I have it on a separate wireless VLAN, and I have every site blocked except the one that it needs to communicate with their API. It’s not perfect, but it’s okay for now while I look for a replacement.

As an experimental physicist, it’s 100% possible to hold beliefs that are incompatible with the theories that support your work while still getting the job done. There is a religious person in my lab, and there is a religious Nobel prize recipient at my university. These people probably couldn’t be relied upon for conversations about the philosophical implications of quantum field theory, but they can certainly still do good science.

Originally, it was due to anti-piracy “make an example of them” court cases, like that of Aaron Swartz. Then hardened by investigative reporting pieces showing how police get access to user data to circumvent 4th amendment protections in the USA, and my own interests in running home servers.